


The Lifespan of a Name

by Margo_Kim



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Sandman (Comics)
Genre: Death, Destiny, Fate & Destiny, Gen, POV Outsider, Sandman Pastiche, Strangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-10-15
Packaged: 2018-04-26 11:49:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5003674
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Before you is a cave where there lies a wounded man. Above him crouches Ho Yinsen, a fellow prisoner, a doctor once who has begun to doubt that his hands would ever again commit any deed but butchery. He knows his death is coming. Everyone does, though the vast majority bury that knowledge deep in the cool earth of their secret selves. This is not an act of cowardice but protection. My sister would be the first to tell you that life is more than waiting for its end, and she more than anyone would know.</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>Yinsen knows he will die and soon. He relishes this knowledge like a child relishes their first secret. It gives him strength when his own is gone, and he uses this strength to heal this man lying before him, this man he does not know, this man to whom he owes nothing. They threaten him with death, of course, if the wounded man should die, but why should Yinsen care about that? He has been ready to die for longer than they’ve been ready to kill him. He saves this man because Yinsen is alive and so is this stranger. He saves this man because that is what you do when someone needs saving.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lifespan of a Name

**Author's Note:**

> So this is actually one of the first fanfics I ever wrote, and it's been hanging out on my computer for about five or six years now. I edited it for basic SPAG but otherwise I left it intact. After you've had the same draft for that long, it starts to feel a bit like an old friend. Let's call it a tribute to the writer I was.

What a strange tendency of life to care when reason so strongly recommends against it. Let’s flip through the pages of Tony Stark’s life to continue this thought. I’ll set the scene. Before you is a cave where there lies a wounded man. Above him crouches Ho Yinsen, a fellow prisoner, a doctor once who has begun to doubt that his hands would ever again commit any deed but butchery. He knows his death is coming. Everyone does, though the vast majority bury that knowledge deep in the cool earth of their secret selves. This is not an act of cowardice but protection. My sister would be the first to tell you that life is more than waiting for its end, and she more than anyone would know.

Yinsen knows he will die and soon. He relishes this knowledge like a child relishes their first secret. It gives him strength when his own is gone, and he uses this strength to heal this man lying before him, this man he does not know, this man to whom he owes nothing. They threaten him with death, of course, if the wounded man should die, but why should Yinsen care about that? He has been ready to die for longer than they’ve been ready to kill him. He saves this man because Yinsen is alive and so is this stranger. He saves this man because that is what you do when someone needs saving.

Flip forward. The wounded man is not whole, will never be whole, and so is like everyone else in that respect. (For further information cross-reference with the gap between the way things appear and the way they are. See also: the gap between what we want and what we get.)  But he has painted himself red and gold, and some days he flies so high and so bright that the world dreams of Icarus for days afterwards. Boys born in this time are disproportionately named Anthony.

He saves people because that is what you do when someone needs saving. This is the only moment in his life and his death that the world will almost universally believe him to be a hero. He almost agrees.

The secret he knows too well is that no matter how high he flies or how bright he shines, he is the same man that he has always been. This is the truth of life: You never lose any part of yourself. You carry all that you have ever been with you until the day you die. He is the same person he was when his mother touched her forehead that was still wet with herself and decided that he didn’t look like a Howard Junior, and he is all the people that came after. The hero in the suit is still the drunk at the party is still the child at MIT is still the prisoner in the cave is still the merchant of death. The bullets and bombs that make Tony Stark the villain finance the suit that makes him the hero. We are always what we have always been, no more or less.

This is the truth of life: Change or die. And everybody dies.

Step sideways for a moment as I follow a thought.

Esperanza Hurston is just turning thirteen, and the most immediate concern in her life is when she will finally grow breasts. The women in her family are amply apportioned, but not her. On the first day of seventh grade, she stuffs tissues in her training bra and walks through the halls with her head held high as the other girls snicker. It is in these halls where she will discover that her family is poor, that they have always been poor, and that she is a worse person because of it. Esperanza accepts the first two as truths and rejects the third. When a classmate asks her where she got her dress, she responds with her chin thrust out and her arms akimbo that it’s homemade. She does not feel shame for anything except feeling shame, and at night she draws the costume she’ll wear one day, the one she’s been designing since she was six and watched a news broadcast of Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. She spends the rest of the afternoon with a towel tied around her neck and screaming that she is Lady Hope, here to save the day.

On a bright Monday morning as Esperanza walks to school, Doctor Doom attempts to invade Manhattan. The city scarcely notices. This is, after all, New York City. If life stopped when a supervillian loomed, life would never have the chance to start up again. Sitting on his stoop as something explodes over head, Joe Stoneman just shakes his head and nudges his niece in the ribs. She’s from Kansas and, in Joe’s mind, needlessly terrified. “Just look at that. _Two_ flying robots? Just two? I’m telling ya, Ruth, Doom ain’t even trying this time. He just wants us all to remember he’s around.”

“It’s working!” Ruth says as she clutches his arm, scared for her life. She does not know how safe she is right now. She does not know that her death lies nestled in her breast. Only twenty-two years old, and the tumor is already formed. But she will live to be sixty-four before it finally claims her, thanks in part to the famous Stark Industry medical breakthroughs of the 2020s, after Pepper Potts finds a lump in her left breast exactly three years from this day. Tony will lay his hand over hers and tell her that she’s not allowed to die yet.

Ruth, her eyes fixed on the sky, does not notice Esperanza waving as she passes by. Joe waves back. He likes Esperanza. Everyone who meets Esperanza likes her. You would like her too.  

Iron Man swoops down at the last robot, readying for the killing blow. Esperanza looks up to watch as she steps into the street.

Nandita Azmi takes her eyes off the road to look at the sky. She has only been in this country two days, here at last for NYU, and already she is watching one of the famed superhero fights. She’s seen the news, watched them on the internet, read about them in the paper, but it’s not the same as watching the sun glint of Iron Man’s armor as he raises his glowing hands and fires. How beautiful the world can be sometimes. How capable it is of astounding you. Nandita’s barely aware of the tears as they run down her face.

Iron Man fires. Esperanza and Nandita cheer.

Nandita thinks she will remember the body of the girl all her life. The limp way it hung in her arms. The angle of her neck. And most of all the blood, the blood that stuck to Nandita’s clothes and stank like pennies, the blood that won’t come off, won’t come off, why won’t it come off? Nandita thinks that she will remember this forever. Nandita is wrong. For the remaining eighty-six years of her life, the details of this Monday will fade, and Nandita will paint in the gaps without ever noticing. (Another gap to note. Any truth that’s ever been dwells in the gaps.) The blood will become redder, the body colder. The sky will seem all the bluer for overhanging such a tragedy, and this stranger’s death will become more and more inevitable until in Nandita’s mind, the girl was always going to step off the curb in that moment as Nandita was always going to look up.

I cannot confirm or deny that. I do not know. All I can offer is that their stories are written in my book, and every time I read them, the text is unchanged, so far as I see. Still, I know of no story that stays the same in rereading, even if it is only the reader who has changed.

We can question endlessly what would have happened to Esperanza Hernando if Tony Stark had died in that cave. My book does not waste space on all the might-have-beens. (How wonderful if it did. How terrible. Both at once. Overlaps are as important to note as gaps. The universe may be nothing but an endless combination of the two.)

Tony Stark dies at age 56. The suit keeps him fighting far longer than it should have, but it can’t keep my sister at bay forever. He saves two hundred thirteen lives on that last mission in exchange for his one and his last thought is that math should make him happy, but it’s not enough, it’s never enough. Throughout his life, his popularity waxed and waned, the savior one month, the tyrant the next. His reputation in death is no different, and just when everyone who remembers the good has finally died and his legacy as the man with a heart of steel seems fixed, the government declassifies everything Tony never wanted the world to know about him. Ten years later, the United States names a medal after him, and for three hundred years, his grave is never without roses. And spit.

And not long after that—to me, perhaps, more than you—they forget him. His name lasts longer than most, but no name lasts forever. Names die too, and my sister comes for them as well in the end as she comes for Tony and you and even me, eventually. If you listen now, you can hear her. She is the sound of wings. She is the gap between heartbeats. She is where the last truth lies, and she holds us tight as she carries us home.


End file.
